Our Poll Position this week once again concerns bringing history to life:

Mythological characters were super-heroes before the medium of comics made it big. Which is right now causing twelve dozen history professors to gun up their Outrage Machines, but hey, I’m a simple guy. Still, you’ve got larger than life people, performing feats far outside the reach of normal people, and transforming their societies.

Which got me thinking, what heroes from out of time would, when brought to the present day, still be heroic? What impact would they have on our modern world? So let’s take them from the top.

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Marvel has announced that Peter Parker will be losing his job as a Daily Bugle photographer in an upcoming issue. Which raises the question:

Discussion to follow.

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We all know the cliche — comics character dies, only to arise from the dead some time later, usually when sales decline. Captain America most recently fell into this category, but the majority of big names come up against it eventually. I tried to come up with someone in super-hero comics besides Gwen Stacey and Uncle Ben Parker who died and stayed dead, but I couldn’t come up with much. Throw Norman Osborne as the original Green Goblin onto that list, and you quickly come to the conclusion that it’s best to steer clear of Spider-Man.

But then, maybe that’s one reason he stayed popular so long? Maybe.

Anyway, that brings us to this week’s Poll Position, only one day late (appropriate when talking about death, amiright?! Although, why do they say “The late Jeff Hebert”? Of course you’re late, you’re dead — you may never get there!):

Discussion after the jump.

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I like thinking about what the real world would be like if some of the genre conventions we all love about comics were to be introduced here. So that’s our weekly conundrum:

Discussion after the jump!

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We have a fair number of folks knowledgeable about ancient mythology ’round this here blog, so I thought it might be interesting to see what you’d think about this question of comics brought to life:

You can look up more information about these various groups of gods on Wikipedia or this nifty site called “Godchecker.com“. My thoughts, such as they are, after the jump. Also, some of these are still (more or less) active in the world today, with actual followers and everything — I certainly mean no disrespect to anyone out there who believes the gods of the given pantheon already really exist. I am referring instead to them as they might play out in a comic-book, super-hero sense, and not in any way to disparage how they are actively worshiped today.

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Our thought-provoking comics-related question of the week is:

Discussion after the jump.

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Sorry for posting this a couple of days late, but this week your dilemma is:

Now, you’re not going to actually BECOME the person in question, you’re just going to have powers BASED ON them. So keep that in mind as we join the discussion after the jump.

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Your Poll Position for the week is:

To be clear, the world of the comics character is real. You would continue living your life here in our reality, but you could go into a cyber tank and take control over the target’s body, which would lie inert and lifeless while you were not jacked in. So basically it would be their body and your mind, but only while you’re awake and in the pod.

So given that, let’s talk about what selection you’d make.

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Setting aside all pretenses of intellectual discourse, I would like to divert this blog temporarily to judging truly weighty matters:

I confess this train of thought left the tracks at Chris’ Invincible Super-Blog, where he often refers to his favorite classic Jim Aparo Batman scene of the Dark Knight knocking a criminal out with a car battery.

So no drawn-out analysis of the options this week*, just sit back and think about various ways of jacking someone up, Caped Crusader-style, and inner nirvana will be yours.

*By which I mean the clear answer should be “Aquaman”.

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Character design is more or less the “raison d’etre” of HeroMachine.com, so I thought we should take some time to figure out what, exactly, makes a costume “super”:

Discussion after the jump.

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